land, marking in blood the line of his march. Towns besieged, provinces wasted, and their inhabitants subjected to the horrors of famine, of rapine and slaughter, were the scenes which presented themselves around his steps. He made himself master of Normandy, married the king's youngest daughter, and after a time returned once more to his own land.
Soon affairs called King Henry again to France. This time he made a public entry into Paris, accompanied by his queen, Catherine, on purpose to show the Parisians their future sovereign. France was no nearer recognising his alleged right to reign over it; and Henry began, as before, to besiege its towns and slaughter its children, in order to compel a submission which it was clear would not be voluntarily given. He was thus occupied when an event took place which put an end to his enterprise for ever; he felt that the hand of death was upon him, and he retired from Cosne, which he was besieging, to Vincennes, near Paris. The Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, and the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, when his end approached, came to his bedside to receive his instructions. He addressed them, protesting that "neither the ambitious desire of enlarging his dominions, nor of winning vain renown and worldly fame, had moved him to engage in these wars, but only the prosecution of his just title; that he might in the end attain to a perfect peace, and come to enjoy those parts of his inheritance which to him of right belonged; and that, before the beginning of the same wars, he was fully persuaded by men both wise and of great holiness of life, that upon such intent he might and ought both begin the same wars, and follow them till he had brought them to an end justly and rightly, and that without all danger of God's displeasure or peril of soul." After making a few necessary arrangements respecting the government of England and France, he recited the seven penitential psalms, received the Sacrament, and so he died, August 31st, 1422.
The magnificence of his funeral is thus described by the chronicler: — "His body, embalmed and enclosed in lead, was laid in a chariot royal, richly appareled with cloth of gold. Upon his coffin was laid a representation of his person, adorned with robes, diadem, scepter, and ball, like a king; the which chariot six horses drew, richly trapped, with several appointments: the first with the arms of St. George, the second with the arms of Normandy, the third of King Arthur, the fourth of St. Edward, the fifth of France, and the sixth with the arms of England and France. On this same chariot gave attendance James, King of Scots, the principal mourner; King Henry's uncle, Thomas, Duke of Exeter; Richard, Earl of Warwick; " and nine other lords and knights. Other lords carried banners and standards.
"The hatchments were carried only by captains, to the number of twelve; and round about the chariot rode 500 men-at-arms, all in black armor, their horses barbed black, and they with the butt-ends of their spears upwards."
"The conduct of this dolorous funeral was committed to Sir William Philip, Treasurer of the King's household, and to Sir William Porter, his chief carver, and others. Besides this, on every side of his chariot went 300 persons, holding long torches, and lords bearing banners, bannerds, and pennons. With this funeral appointment was he conveyed from Bets de Vincennes to Paris, and so to Rouen, to Abbeville, to Calais, to Dover; from thence through London to Westminster, where he was interred with such solemn ceremonies, mourning of lords, prayer of priests, and such lamenting of commons, as never before then the like was seen in England," Tapers were kept burning day and night on his tomb, till the Reformation came to put them out.
Henry V. had not a few great qualities which, in other circumstances, would have enabled him to render services of great value and lasting benefit to his nation. His strength of character was attested by his conquest over his youthful passions and habits when he came to the throne. He was gentle in disposition, frank in manners, and courageous in spirit, he was a lover of justice, and showed a desire to have it purely administered. He ate temperately, passed but few hours in bed, and in field exercises displayed the strength of an athlete. His good sense made him valuable in council; but it was in marshalling an army for battle that his genius especially shone.
Had these talents and energies been exercised at home, what blessings might they not have conferred upon his subjects? But the fatal counsel of the archbishop and the clergy diverted them all into a channel in which they were productive of terrible mischiefs to the country of which he was the rightful lord, and to that other which he aspired to rule, but the crown of which riot all his valor and toil were able to place upon his head. He went down into the grave in the flower of his age, in the very prime of his manhood, after a reign of ten years, "and all his mighty projects vanished into smoke." He left his throne to his son, an infant only a few months old, bequeathing to him along with the crown a legacy of complications at home and wars abroad, for which a "hundred Agincourts" would not have compensated. This episode of Henry and his wars with France belongs to the history of Protestantism, springing as it does directly out of the policy which was framed for arresting it.
While these armaments and battles were going forward, how fared it, we return to ask, with the new opinions and their disciples in England? Did these great storms root out, or did they shelter, the seed which Wicliffe had sowed, and which the blood of the martyrs who came after him had watered and caused to spring up? They were a protection, we are disposed to think, on the whole, to the infant Protestantism of England. Its adherents were a humble, unorganised company of men, who shunned rather than courted observation. Still we trace their presence in the nation, as we light, in the ecclesiastical records of their age, at brief intervals of time, upon a stake, and a Lollard sealing his testimony thereat.
On August 17, 1415, John Claydon, a currier in London, was brought before Henry, Archbishop of Canterbury. In former years, Claydon had been in the prison of the Fleet on a charge of heresy. He was set free on abjuring his opinions. On this his second apprehension, he boldly confessed the faith he had denied aforetime. One of the main charges against him was his having in his house many books written in English, and in especial one book, called the Lanthorn of Light. This book was produced against him by the Mayor of London, who had taken possession of it, along with others, when he apprehended him. It was bound in red leather, written on parchment, in a good English hand, and Claydon confessed that it had been made at his own cost and charges, and that he often read in it, for he found it "good and healthful for his soul." The mayor said that the books he found in the house of Claydon "were, in his judgment, the worst and most perverse he ever did read or see." He was sentenced as a relapsed heretic, and delivered to the secular power. Committed to the fire at Smithfield, "he was there meekly," says Fox, "made a burnt-offering to the Lord." He is said by some to have had a companion at the stake, George Gurmyn, with whom, as it came out on his examination, he had often communed about the matters of their common faith.
The year after the martyrdom of Claydon, the growth of Lollardism was borne testimony to by Archbishop Chicheley, in a new edict which he issued, in addition to those that his predecessor, Arundel, had enacted. The archbishop's edict had been preceded by the Act of Parliament, passed in 1414, soon after the midnight meeting at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, which made it one and the same thing to be a Lollard and to be a traitor. The preamble of the Act of Parliament set forth that "there had been great congregations and insurrections, as well by them of the sect of heresy commonly called Lollardy, as by others of their confederacy, to the intent to annul, destroy, and subvert the Christian faith, and also to destroy our Sorereign Lord the King, and all other manner of Estates of the Realm of England, as well spiritual as temporal, and also all manner of policy, and finally the laws of the land." These simple men, who read the Scriptures, believed what they taught, and assembled in secret places to worship God, are painted in the Act as the most dangerous of conspirators — as men aiming at the destruction of society itself, and so are to be hunted out and exterminated. Accordingly, the Act goes on to enjoin that all judges, justices, and magistrates shall take an oath to make inquisition for Lollards, and that they shall issue warrants for their apprehension, and delivery to the ecclesiastical judges, that they may "be acquit or convict by the laws of holy Church."
This paved the way for the edict of the primate, which enjoined on his suffragan bishops and their commissaries a similar pursuit of heretics and heresy. In pointing out whom he would have apprehended, the archbishop undesignedly gives us the true character of the men whom Parliament
