Prince Henry

“ On his father's side he was descended in direct line from the ancient princes of Powis; on his mother's from the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. He was the most learned and illustrious Englishman of his age. He had stood high in King Henry's favour; he was destined for the greatest offices in the state. He was not without natural ambition. Yet he forfeited all that he had—the favour of his prince, the society of his mother whom he loved, and the kindred who were proud of him, the hope of promotion and of power, his friends, his home, and his country, for conscience' sake. ”

“ It would not be possible to find a greater contrast than was presented between France, distracted by factions struggling for the power which a lunatic king dropped from his hands, and England, harmonious and enthusiastic, welcoming back after a brilliant victory its vigorous prince, and united in giving him all the help that he demanded. If the darling scheme of the Plantagenets, the union of the two crowns, had been within the limits of possibility, Henry would certainly have effected it. ”

“ This merchant and the Saracen lady had one son, Thomas à Becket. He it was who became the Favorite of King Henry the Second.
He had become Chancellor, when the King thought of making him Archbishop. He was clever, gay, well educated, brave; had fought in several battles in France; had defeated a French knight in single combat, and brought his horse away as a token of the victory. He lived in a noble palace, he was the tutor of the young Prince Henry, he was served by one hundred and forty knights, his riches were immense. ”

“ The King’s Ministers were not the representatives of the majority in Parliament, but friends and counsellors of his own choice, often, of course, his own kinsmen. Edward the First had been the support of his feeble father, and the Third Edward had had an able lieutenant in the Black Prince. All that is recorded in authentic documents about Prince Henry tends to make us believe that his behaviour as successor to the crown resembled that of those great predecessors in his place. ”

“ An Elegy upon Prince Henry's death [Died Nov. 6, 1612.]
Keep station, Nature, and rest, Heaven, sure
On thy supporters' shoulders, lest, past cure,
Thou dash'd in ruin fall, by a grief's weight
Will make thy basis shrink, and lay thy height
Low as the centre. Hark! and feel it read
Through the astonish'd Kingdom, Henry's dead.
It is enough; who seeks to aggravate
One strain beyond this, prove [s] more sharp his fate
Than sad our doom. The world dares not survive
10To parallel this woe's superlative. ”

“ This year the sudden death of Henry, prince of Wales, diffused a universal grief throughout the nation. Though youth and royal birth, both of them strong allurements, prepossess men mightily in favor of the early age of princes, it is with peculiar fondness that historians mention Henry, and, in every respect, his merit seems to have been extraordinary. He had not reached his eighteenth year, and he already possessed more dignity in his behavior, and commanded more respect, than his father, with all his age, learning, and experience. ”

“ By a compact entered into with Stephen and the assembled barons, in the latter days of that prince, Henry II., grandson of Henry I., [Pg 131] succeeded to the throne, and was crowned at Westminster, Dec. 19, 1154, attended by a great concourse of foreign nobility. His queen received the royal unction on Christmas-day, 1158.
During the disputes between this monarch and the celebrated Thomas à Becket, we find the king adopting a singular expedient for strengthening and perpetuating the authority of his family—the coronation of his son Henry. ”

“ But hearing of sermons was not the only sign of Prince Henry's piety. He was diligent in his own private prayers, generally going apart three times a day to pray quietly by himself. He was most careful too of the good behavior of his household. And above all things he had a horror of profane swearing. At his three palaces, St. James's in London, Richmond, and [Pg 202] Nonsuch, he ordered boxes to be kept for the fines he exacted from all those who used bad words; and this money was given to the poor.
There is a story told by Coke, the historian, how that the prince was once hunting a stag. ”

“ It would be tedious to give all the details of Henry’s proceedings that may be found in the public documents of the time. On the whole, we get from these sources the picture of a vigorous young prince, who must of course have been assisted by older counsellors, but who was not a mere puppet in their hands. He is making head to the best of his abilities and means against a formidable rebellion. He is much hampered by want of money, and the King and the Council try to help him. As time goes on, more means and more power are put into his hands. ”

“ On the occasion of the creation of Prince Henry as prince of Wales in 1610 he was made a knight of the Bath, subsequently travelled with Sir Henry Wotton, then ambassador to the duke of Savoy, and on his return married his first wife, Elizabeth, daughter of William Basset of Blore, Staffordshire, and widow of Henry Howard, 3rd son of the earl of Suffolk. ”

“ The verdict showed the new ideal of kingship which had grown up during Henry's reign, and which made itself deeply felt over the whole land when in the days of his successor the duties of righteous government were thrown aside for the vainglories of religious chivalry. But the patriarch heard the answer with bitter disappointment, and was not appeased by promises of money and forces for the war. "Not thus will you save your soul nor the heritage of Christ," he declared. "We come to seek a king, not money; for every corner of the world sends us money, but not one a prince." ”

“ Prince Henry (born 28th June 1491, died 28th January 1547) was the second son of Henry VII., and in 1509 succeeded his father on the throne of England. Henry VIII. always lived in much luxury and loved finery and splendour, and to a certain extent this feeling shows in the many beautiful bindings which were made for him. The King was certainly fond of his books, and he had several of them beautifully bound in velvet and embroidered with pearls and inlays of coloured silks and satins, finished with gold thread. Others are of gold, richly worked and enamelled. ”

“ Henry is kindly and pleasant to every one as Prince, to every one deserving as King; and he is so not merely out of policy: but there is no sign in him of a strong affection for any one, such an affection as we recognise at a glance in Hamlet and Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, and many more. ”

“ These are no mere trifles below the dignity of history; they help to explain the extraordinary hold Henry obtained over popular imagination. Suppose there ascended the throne to-day a young prince, the hero of the athletic world, the finest oar, the best bat, the crack marksman of his day, it is easy to imagine the enthusiastic support he would receive from thousands of his people who care much for sport, and nothing at all for politics. ”

“ Henry, under his guidance, devoted himself with great delight to the study of polite literature, and gave free wing to an ennobled imagination as he clambered up the cliffs, and wandered over the ravines familiar to the days of his childhood. His personal appearance in 1567, when he was thirteen years of age, is thus described by a Roman Catholic gentleman who was accustomed to meet him daily in the court of Catharine.
Description of the prince.
"We have here the young Prince of Bearn. One can not help acknowledging that he is a beautiful creature. ”

“ When Henry IV. ascended the throne, parliament prayed that the Prince might not leave the realm, but remain in England as the anchor of the people's hopes; and, soon after his own accession, [12] Henry V. is advised by his council to remain near London, that he might receive prompt intelligence of whatever might arise in any quarter, and be able to take immediate steps for the safety of the commonweal. He seems to have carried with him even from his earliest youth, wherever he went, a peculiar talent of exciting confidence in every one. ”

“ In this he received more encouragement from the people than from his own timid father, who told him his brother Charles would make a better king than he, unless Henry spent more time at his books and less at his pike and his bow. The people, on the other hand, were constantly comparing their young prince with the great Henry the Fifth, the hero of Agincourt, and predicting of him as famous deeds as those recorded of his illustrious namesake. ”

“ He sat for Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, in the parliament summoned in the autumn of 1597. On 7 May 1603 he was knighted. Prince Henry was friendly with him, and had the prince lived he would doubtless have become a secretary of state. ”

“ Yet here Prince Edward stands, King Henry's son.
Look, therefore, Lewis, that by this league and marriage
Thou draw not on thy danger and dishonour;
For though usurpers sway the rule awhile, ⁠76
Yet heavens are just, and time suppresseth wrongs.
War. Injurious Margaret!
Prince.⁠And why not queen?
War. Because thy father Henry did usurp,
And thou no more art prince than she is queen. ⁠80
Oxf. Then Warwick disannuls great John of Gaunt,
Which did subdue the greatest part of Spain ”

“ Henry’s generosity of temper, or at least his confidence in his position, a frame of mind which often leads to the same course of action, was shown by his treatment of those whom a meaner or weaker prince might have regarded as rivals or enemies. The young Earl of March, who was still regarded by some as the rightful heir to the crown, was released from imprisonment to which the suspicious fears of the deceased King had condemned him. Henry had been the guardian of the young man’s estates, and seems to have discharged the trust with fidelity. ”

“ For some time after William of Normandy seized the English throne the relations of the King of England to the King of France—it might be more correct to say, the king who reigned at Paris—were those of an over-powerful vassal to a weak suzerain. When Henry the Second actually ruled over a larger part of France than the prince who was nominally its sovereign, this reversal of the ordinary state of things, according to which the lord was the superior, the vassal the inferior, was complete. ”

“ On the other hand, we cannot wholly disregard the contemporary evidence (for all other has been left out of the account) which attributes to him a certain laxity of life during the years that preceded his accession to the throne. Such a laxity is only too probable in a young prince. The temptations to which the young kinsmen of the ruler are exposed, before they feel the responsibilities of power, are the weak point of the system of hereditary monarchy. It would have been scarcely indeed a miracle, but certainly a most uncommon experience, if Henry had passed through them altogether unscathed. ”

“ In April, 1502, at the age of ten, Henry became the heir-apparent to the English throne. He succeeded at once to the dukedom of Cornwall, but again a precedent was set which was followed but yesterday; and ten months were allowed to elapse before he was, on 18th February, 1503, created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, the dukedom of York becoming void until a king or an heir apparent should again have a second son. [58] The first sign of his increased importance was his implication in the maze of matrimonial intrigues which formed so large a part of sixteenth-century diplomacy. ”

“ He died the meanest and the richest prince in Christendom. Besides the money he had laid up, he had improved the landed revenues of the crown by the attainders and forfeitures of the Yorkist nobility. To his son, Henry VIII, these circumstances at once presented a platform of vast power from which to start on his royal career, and a most advantageous foil to his own character.
Henry was young, handsome, accomplished, and gay. He was in many respects the very opposite of his father, and the people always give to a young prince every virtue under the sun. ”

“ At this period the Court of Henry was a scene of great splendour, outward prosperity, and festive enjoyment. Henry was in the flower of his life, being about thirty years of age. His portrait, as drawn by Sebastiano Guistiniani, the Venetian ambassador, gives a very lively and striking idea of him:—"His majesty is as handsome as nature could form him, above any other Christian prince—handsomer by far than the King of France. He is exceedingly fair, and as well proportioned as possible. When he learned that the King of France wore a beard, he allowed his also to grow." ”

“ The legendary tales which speak of him as a debauched and idle youth, who consorted with disreputable favourites, such as Shakespeare's famous "Sir John Falstaff," are entirely worthless. Of all these fables the only one that seems to have any foundation is that which tells how Henry was suspected by his father of over-great ambition and of aiming at the crown. It appears that the prince's supporters, the two Beauforts, suggested to King Henry that he should abdicate, and pass on the sceptre to his son. ”

“ Being told the latter, he turned himself in his bed: “The crown came with a woman,” said he, “and it will go with one: many miseries await this poor kingdom: Henry will make it his own either by force of arms or by marriage.” A few days after, he expired, in the flower of his age: a prince of considerable virtues and talents; well fitted, by his vigilance and personal courage, for repressing those disorders to which his kingdom, during that age, was so much exposed. He executed justice with impartiality and rigor ”