The King’s health sank more and more, and he became subject to violent
eruptions on the face and to bad epileptic fits, and his spirits sank
every day. At last, as he was praying before the shrine of St. Edward
at Westminster Abbey, he was seized with a terrible fit, and was
carried into the Abbot’s chamber, where he presently died. It had been
foretold that he would die at Jerusalem, which certainly is not, and
never was, Westminster. But, as the Abbot’s room had long been called
the Jerusalem chamber, people said it was all the same thing, and were
quite satisfied with the prediction.
The King died on the 20th of March, 1413, in the forty-seventh year of
his age, and the fourteenth of his reign. He was buried in Canterbury
Cathedral. He had been twice married, and had, by his first wife, a
family of four sons and two daughters. Considering his duplicity before
he came to the throne, his unjust seizure of it, and above all, his
making that monstrous law for the burning of what the priests called
heretics, he was a reasonably good king, as kings went.
CHAPTER XXI
ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE FIFTH
FIRST PART
The Prince of Wales began his reign like a generous and honest man. He
set the young Earl of March free; he restored their estates and their
honours to the Percy family, who had lost them by their rebellion
against his father; he ordered the imbecile and unfortunate Richard to
be honourably buried among the Kings of England; and he dismissed all
his wild companions, with assurances that they should not want, if they
would resolve to be steady, faithful, and true.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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