History of the English People, Volume III | Page 9

which
he had vowed he was too weak to meet the Houses on their assembly. If
we may trust a charge which was afterwards denied, the king's
half-brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, one of the Beaufort children
of John of Gaunt, acting in secret co-operation with the Prince, now
brought the peers to pray Henry to suffer his son to be crowned in his
stead. The king's refusal was the last act of a dying man. Before the end
of March he breathed his last in the "Jerusalem Chamber" within the
Abbot's house at Westminster; and the Prince obtained the crown which
he had sought.
[Sidenote: Suppression of the Lollards]

The removal of Archbishop Arundel from the Chancellorship, which
was given to Henry Beaufort of Winchester, was among the first acts of
Henry the Fifth; and it is probable that this blow at the great foe of the
Lollards gave encouragement to the hopes of Oldcastle. He seized the
opportunity of the coronation in April to press his opinions on the
young king, though probably rather with a view to the plunder of the
Church than to any directly religious end. From the words of the
clerical chroniclers it is plain that Henry had no mind as yet for any
open strife with either party, and that he quietly put the matter aside.
He was in fact busy with foreign affairs. The Duke of Clarence was
recalled from Bordeaux, and a new truce concluded with France. The
policy of Henry was clearly to look on for a while at the shifting
politics of the distracted kingdom. Soon after his accession another
revolution in Paris gave the charge of the mad King Charles, and with it
the nominal government of the realm, to the Duke of Orleans; and his
cause derived fresh strength from the support of the young Dauphin,
who was afterwards to play so great a part in the history of France as
Charles the Seventh. John of Burgundy withdrew to Flanders, and both
parties again sought Henry's aid. But his hands were tied as yet by
trouble at home. Oldcastle was far from having abandoned his projects,
discouraged as they had been by his master; while the suspicions of
Henry's favour to the Lollard cause which could hardly fail to be roused
by his favour to the Lollard leader only spurred the bold spirit of
Arundel to energetic action. A council of bishops gathered in the
summer to denounce Lollardry and at once called on Henry to suffer
Oldcastle to be brought to justice. The king pleaded for delay in the
case of one who was so close a friend, and strove personally to
convince Lord Cobham of his errors. All however was in vain, and
Oldcastle withdrew to his castle of Cowling, while Arundel summoned
him before his court and convicted him as a heretic. His open defiance
at last forced the king to act. In September a body of royal troops
arrested Lord Cobham and carried him to the Tower; but his life was
still spared, and after a month's confinement his imprisonment was
relaxed on his promise of recantation. Cobham however had now
resolved on open resistance. He broke from the Tower in November,
and from his hiding-place organized a vast revolt. At the opening of
1414 a secret order summoned the Lollards to assemble in St. Giles's

Fields outside London. We gather, if not the real aims of the rising, at
least the terror it caused, from Henry's statement that its purpose was
"to destroy himself, his brothers, and several of the spiritual and
temporal lords"; from Cobham's later declarations it is probable that the
pretext of the rising was to release Richard, whom he asserted to be still
alive, and to set him again on the throne. But the vigilance of the young
king prevented the junction of the Lollards within the city with their
confederates without, and these as they appeared at the place of
meeting were dispersed by the royal troops.
[Sidenote: Renewal of the French War]
The failure of the rising only increased the rigour of the law.
Magistrates were directed to arrest all heretics and hand them over to
the bishops; a conviction of heresy was made to entail forfeiture of
blood and estate; and the execution of thirty-nine prominent Lollards as
traitors gave terrible earnest of the king's resolve to suppress their sect.
Oldcastle escaped, and for four years longer strove to rouse revolt after
revolt. He was at last captured on the Welsh border and burned as a
heretic; but from the moment when his attempt at revolt was crushed in
St. Giles's Fields the dread of Lollardry was broken and Henry was free
to take a more energetic course of policy on the other side the sea. He