The first part of Henry’s public life, the period of his lieutenancy of Wales and the Welsh border, has now been dealt with. We may pass on to the second, which may be roughly described as extending from the beginning of 1409 up to his accession to the throne. On February 28th, 1408–9, he was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Keeper of the Cinque Ports. After this we find no mention of his personal presence in Wales, though, as has been mentioned, he continued to hold the office of Lieutenant of that principality. He seems to have resided chiefly in London or at the seat of his new duties. This, then, seems a convenient opportunity of discussing the famous story of his insolent behaviour to the Chief Justice, his punishment, and his submission. Shakespeare, indeed, would seem to place the incident in the first period of the Prince’s life. In the first act of the second part of Henry the Fourth, Falstaff’s page says to his master, when the Chief Justice enters, “Here comes the nobleman who committed the Prince for striking him about Bardolph.” This, therefore, puts it back to some time before the battle of Shrewsbury, which, it will be remembered, is supposed to have been fought just before23 the beginning of the second drama. This is manifestly impossible. If there were nothing else to disprove it—and the Prince’s age, barely fifteen, would be itself sufficient—there is the fact that he resided continuously in Wales. The incident, if it be a fact, must be assigned to the time when Henry was living in or near London.
We may notice, before proceeding, the curious carelessness in the great dramatist which makes the Prince strike the Chief Justice “about Bardolph.” Bardolph is one of the boon companions of Falstaff. The Prince never expresses anything but contempt for him.
A few lines from the famous scene may be quoted. The King, then newly seated on the throne, asks the Chief Justice, who has come to offer his homage,
“How might a prince of my great hopes forget So great indignities you laid upon me? What! rate, rebuke, and roughly send to prison The immediate heir of England!”
And then, after hearing the defence, he goes on:
“You are right, justice, and you weigh this well; Therefore still bear the balance and the sword: And I do wish your honours may increase, Till you do live to see a son of mine Offend you and obey you, as I did. So shall I live to speak my father’s words: Happy am I, that have a man so bold, That dares do justice on my proper son; And not less happy, having such a son, That would deliver up his greatness so Into the hands of justice.”
No more picturesque incident, it must be allowed, has ever been used to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” We cannot wonder that it has become one of the commonplaces24 of history, or of what passes as history. What, then, is the foundation of the story; or, if it has no foundation, what is its origin?
It appears for the first time in The Boke named the Governour of Sir Thomas Elyot, a philosophico-political treatise, published in 1531. The story as he tells it runs thus:
“The most renowned Prince, King Henry the Fifth, late King of England, during the life of his father was noted to be fierce and of wanton courage. It happened that one of his servants whom he well favoured, for felony by him committed, was arraigned at the King’s Bench; whereof he being advertised, and incensed by light persons about him, in furious rage came hastily to the bar, where his servant stood as a prisoner, and commanded him to be ungyved and set at liberty, whereat all men were abashed, except the Chief Justice, who humbly exhorted the Prince to be contented that his servant might be ordered according to the ancient laws of the realm, or if he would have him saved from the rigour of the laws, that he should obtain, if he might, of the King, his father, his gracious pardon; whereby no law or justice should be derogate. With which answer the Prince nothing appeased, but rather more inflamed, endeavoured himself to take away his servant. The judge, considering the perilous example and inconvenience that might thereby ensue, with a valiant spirit and courage commanded the Prince upon his allegiance to leave the prisoner and depart his way. With which commandment the Prince, being set all in a fury, all chafed, and in a terrible manner, came up to the place of judgment—men thinking that he would have slain the judge, or have done to him some damage; but the judge sitting still, without moving, declaring the majesty of the King’s place of judgment, and with an assured and bold countenance made to the Prince these words following:—‘Sir, remember yourself; I keep here the place of the King, your sovereign lord and father, to whom ye owe double obedience, wherefore, eftsoons in his25 name, I charge you desist of your wilfulness and unlawful entry here, and from henceforth give good example to those which hereafter shall be your proper subjects. And now for your contempt and disobedience go you to the prison of the King’s Bench, whereunto I commit you; and remain ye there prisoner until the pleasure of the King, your father, be further known.’ With which words being abashed, and also wondering at the marvellous gravity of that worshipful Justice, the noble Prince, laying his weapon apart, doing reverence, departed and went to the King’s Bench, as he was commanded. Whereat his servants disdaining, came and showed to the King all the whole affair. Whereat he awhile studying, after as a man all ravished with gladness, holding his eyes and hands up towards heaven, abraided, saying with a loud voice, ‘O merciful God, how much am I, above all other men, bound to your infinite goodness; specially for that ye have given me a judge who feareth not to minister justice, and also a son who can suffer semblably and obey justice?’”
This narrative is circumstantial enough, though it gives no note of time. On what foundation, then, does it rest, for we can hardly suppose it to be a pure invention? There certainly appears to have been a tradition which attributes some such misconduct to the Prince. Some few years after the appearance of Sir Thomas Elyot’s book, one Robert Redman or Redmayne wrote a book which he entitled Historia Henrici Quinti. He thus expresses himself:
“He was removed from the Council (Senatus), and access to the Court was forbidden to him. His reputation was checked in mid-course, because he struck the Chief Justice, whose function it was to solve suits and decide causes, when the said Justice had committed to prison one from whose companionship Henry derived a singular pleasure.”
Here the offence is the same, but the punishment is26 different. Of the alleged removal of the Prince from the Council it will be more convenient to speak hereafter.
Of Richard Redman we know nothing beyond what may be learnt from the internal evidence of his chronicle, and this amounts to little more than that he was a scholar well versed in Latin literature; that he was inclined to the Reformed opinions; and that he wrote somewhat earlier than the middle of the sixteenth century. It seems, however, that there was a Redman who was present at the battle of Agincourt, and who on one occasion was joined in a commission with Gascoigne, the hero of the story. It has been suggested that this Redman was an ancestor of the chronicler, and that he derived his story from a tradition current in his family. Of this we can only say that it is not impossible, not forgetting, however, that such a tradition may indeed have existed and yet not have been true.
Finally, Thomas Hardyng tells us that the punishment of removal from the Council was inflicted upon the Prince by the King, but does not mention the offence which was thus visited. Hardyng was a contemporary; indeed, as he was born 1378, he was very nearly of the same age as Henry. So far his testimony is valuable, though his account of the incident seems to have been written quite late in life. But, as the Prince’s offence is not specified, it has but a very indirect bearing on the question.
On the other hand, an examination of the records of the Court of the King’s Bench shows that there is no entry to be found in them of any committal of the Prince. It has been pointed out that the summary committal to prison of an offender, as described by Elyot,27 was not the course of proceeding at the time. This, however, may be waived. The Prince may have been tried by a jury impanelled on the spot, and sent to prison when found guilty by them; and for this course of proceeding a more dramatically effective committal by the presiding judge may have been substituted. But the incident must, one would think, have been recorded in one way or another, and the absolute silence of the rolls and year-books of the Court affords a strong presumption that nothing of the kind ever occurred.
But on looking back to the records of an earlier time, we find that on one occasion a Prince of Wales had been guilty of contempt of Court and had been punished for it by his father. In the thirty-fourth year of Edward the First, one William de Breora, having had judgment pronounced against him by Roger de Hegham, one of the Barons of the Exchequer, “climbed in contemptuous fashion upon the bar, and with grave and bitter words found fault with the said judgment and also insulted the said Roger as he was leaving the Court.” The Court proceeded to punish him for this offence, and rested its action on what had recently been done in a similar case.
“Such acts,” it says, “namely, contempt and disobedience done to the servants of our Lord King, as to the King himself and his Court, are exceedingly odious. This was lately manifested when the said King removed his eldest and dearly beloved son, Edward, Prince of Wales, from his house for nearly the space of half-a-year, because he had spoken gross and bitter words to a servant of the King; nor would he suffer him to come into his presence till he had satisfied the aforesaid servant of the King in the matter of his offence.”
There can, I think, be little doubt that we have here28 the germs of the story which Shakespeare afterwards so effectively used. It has been acutely pointed out that several phrases in Elyot’s narrative have the appearance of having been translated from the Latin; and the theory is that some chronicler compounded the various incidents as they had occurred or were supposed to have occurred, and combined them with the story which is told in the Governour, and which has been immortalised by Shakespeare. It should, perhaps, be added that Gascoigne had shown in a very striking way his independence of spirit. After the suppression of the northern insurrection in 1405, the King directed him to pronounce sentence of death on the two leaders, Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, and Thomas Mowbray, Earl Marshall, who had been captured and probably tried and condemned by some kind of court-martial. Gascoigne, who was Chief Justice (he had been appointed to the office in November 1400), refused to do so. He declared that as to the Archbishop, neither the King nor any of the King’s subjects could lawfully put him to death; as to the Earl Marshall, he had the right to be tried by his peers. Independence in a judge has always been especially dear to Englishmen. To a monkish historian—and almost all the historians of the time were monks—such independence could not show itself in a more praiseworthy fashion than in asserting the exemption of ecclesiastical persons from the jurisdiction of lay courts. Gascoigne, then, would be a genuine hero, and, as with other genuine heroes, a great amount of myth may well have grown up about his true story.
It only remains to examine the conclusion of the legend, as Shakespeare tells it. The young King is there29 represented as assuring him of his favour, and promising to continue him in office.
We find him acting as a judge in Hilary term 1413 (January and February). Henry the Fourth died on March 20th. His successor summoned a new Parliament by writ bearing date the 23rd day of that month, and among the persons summoned was William Gascoigne. But on March 29th William Hankford, a puisne judge of the Common Pleas, was appointed to Gascoigne’s office. On July 7th of the same year there is recorded a payment made to him, as late Chief Justice, on account of salary and annuity. It is quite possible that he voluntarily resigned his office. We do not exactly know his age, but he must have been advanced in years. He had been practising as an advocate as early as the year 1374, which may well throw back his birth as far as 1340. In this case he would be seventy-three at Henry’s accession, and seventy-three meant much more then than it does now. He died in 1419. It may be mentioned that in 1414 a royal warrant gave him for life four bucks and four does out of the forest of Pontefract. On the whole, the evidence in the matter has an absolutely neutral effect. It disproves, indeed, anything like a display of magnanimity on Henry’s part; but then there does not seem to have been any occasion for such magnanimity. Gascoigne may have been removed from his office, a common enough practice in the days when such offices were held at the royal pleasure, or he may have resigned. That he was continued in his office by the young King is certainly a fiction. There can be little doubt that the same may be said of the whole story.